Control Traffic Protection in Software-Defined Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm that assumes a logically centralized control plane separated from the data plane. Despite all its advantages, separating the control and data planes introduces new challenges regarding resilient communications between the two. That is, disconnections between switches and their controllers could result in substantial packet loss and performance degradation. To achieve resilient control traffic forwarding, this paper investigates the protection of control traffic in SDNs with multiple controllers. We propose a control traffic protection scheme that combines both local rerouting and constrained reverse forwarding protections. This scheme enables switches to locally react to failures and redirect the control traffic to controllers by using standby backup forwarding options. Our goal is then to find a set of primary routes for control traffic, called protection control network, where as much control traffic as possible can benefit from the proposed protection scheme. We formulate the protection control network problem and develop an algorithm to solve it. Simulation results on real topologies show that our approach significantly improves the resilience of control traffic.